Sylvia_Bandersnatch:In a 'making of' reel, a couple of the actors talk about how they were coached and drilled in how to pronounce it properly, but realised they really never would. In the end, this is okay, though. This is an English-language show, made for an English-language audience. The Chinese only needs to *sound* authentic -- to anglophones. Chinese is very difficult for most Westerners to learn, unlike the Latin- and Nordic-Germanic languages that are much more closely related to English. It takes years of serious dedicated study. That's a lot to ask of actors who already have a lot of their plate. This wasn't an Oscar shot, and not really even an Emmy shot. More, the show is almost entirely allegorical rather than literal; it's a Western, in space, in the future, but it's mostly about our present and past, the same way the original Star Trek was. If you parse it out rationally, it actually makes almost no sense at all. But that's not the point of it. So it's not actually important if the Chinese is correct for viewers fluent in Chinese, any more than it's important for the cartoonish ship's engine to make sense to an engineer.

I guess that's true.

But what compounds the horrible is the fact that Nathan Fillion has the worst Chinese in the history of white people speaking Chinese. And he persists on flaying the language alive on Castle, as if it's his personal joke.

Or rather, someone told him his Chinese was actually really good as something of a mean-spirited joke and no one has had the heart to tell him it's awful in a decade.

Seth'n'Spectrum:IlGreven: Eh, I liked "Ariel" and "Trash" best, for the same reason.

Ariel and Trash were definitely two of the best.

qorkfiend: The best part about Firefly was the fluent cursing...in Chinese.

You're kidding, right? It's like they didn't even bother to hire a Chinese coach. That was the one thing that broke my immersion in that show.

In a 'making of' reel, a couple of the actors talk about how they were coached and drilled in how to pronounce it properly, but realised they really never would. In the end, this is okay, though. This is an English-language show, made for an English-language audience. The Chinese only needs to *sound* authentic -- to anglophones. Chinese is very difficult for most Westerners to learn, unlike the Latin- and Nordic-Germanic languages that are much more closely related to English. It takes years of serious dedicated study. That's a lot to ask of actors who already have a lot of their plate. This wasn't an Oscar shot, and not really even an Emmy shot. More, the show is almost entirely allegorical rather than literal; it's a Western, in space, in the future, but it's mostly about our present and past, the same way the original Star Trek was. If you parse it out rationally, it actually makes almost no sense at all. But that's not the point of it. So it's not actually important if the Chinese is correct for viewers fluent in Chinese, any more than it's important for the cartoonish ship's engine to make sense to an engineer.

K.B.O. Winston:timujin: "The Message" is probably my least favorite Firefly episode, that guy was weak and whiny. Out of Gas was cool, but it's gotta be Objects in Space FTW.

Really? Least favorite?

Are you including the one where River and Simon gets kidnapped by hill folk? Maybe it was just the actress playing the main local but that ep was so bad it felt like it was bad-touching my beloved Firefly.

/or were you just pretending it didn't exist?

It's got a joke about black market beagles. How is that not funny? And I liked the "That's a post-holer. You dig holes... for posts" bit, too. Also, it starts some of the back story for Simon and River.

The Message may not be the strongest Firefly episode, but his review of it is spot on.

Shepherd gets his Badass moment, (Although "Kneecaps" from War Stories was freaking awesome as well, and it shows the viewers that while the war may have made Mal who he is, the crew is his life now, and he will defend them without mercy.

Once More With Feeling is probably my favorite episode of any TV series ever. Probably because I am theatre geek, and also because my work crew is also full of people with great voices, and there have been MANY occasions where we would spontaneously burst into song, and it would almost always end up with us doing most, if not all of the songs from Once More With Feeling.